I’m the author of several books about food and agriculture, including A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, American Pests: Our Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT, and Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. I live in Austin, Texas, where the most agriculturally ambitious thing I do is grow herbs in large pots on my back deck. I’m employed as a professor of history at Texas State University, where I teach courses in environmental history. A journalist once called me a “contrarian agrarian,” a description with which I take issue. But only sort of.

Milk Of Human Kindness Denied To Dairy Cows

Recent reports of mothers purchasing tainted breast milk online has sparked a discussion not only about regulating the underground trade in breast milk, but the legitimacy of human “milk sharing” in the first place.

Although considerable evidence shows that breast milk is much healthier than formula, critics of the practice still find donating breast milk to be problematic. As one milk donor summarized a common reaction in a Huffington Post piece: ”Ewww, it’s weird.” The “ick” response only intensifies when the issue involves human adults drinking human breast milk.

Interestingly, few consumers who are offended by the traffic in human breast milk have a problem with drinking milk from cows. Given that drinking the milk of one’s own species provides the most natural source of nutrition known to mammalian life, it’s strange–or perhaps just a testament to the marketing geniuses in the milk industry–that everyday consumers of conventional bovine milk rarely pause to ponder the implications of supping on the stolen secretions of another species.

“Many of us assume that milk is as innocuous a product as an apple,” writes Sherry Colb, Professor of Law and Charles Evans Hughes Scholar at Cornell University School of Law. “We have absorbed this message repeatedly from a very early age.” And as Gary Francione, Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers, has famously said, “There is probably more suffering in a glass of milk than a pound of steak.”

Perhaps the most unpleasant fact to consider about cows’ milk destined for human consumption is that it almost certainly required a heifer’s forced impregnation. Female cows are strapped to a rack (common slang often refers to the device as a “rape rack”) and inseminated with semen stored in a massive syringe. There are 9 million dairy cows in the United States. Nearly every one of them suffers immensely from the results of this experience. (Although, as this description suggests, the process itself is no picnic.)

Left to her own devices after giving birth, a mother cow would feed her calf for nine to twelve months (not to mention play with her calf, teach her calf, protect her calf, and nuzzle her calf). But because the cow’s milk has been reserved for human consumption, the calf is forcibly removed from the mother soon (and sometimes immediately) after birth. Mother cows have highly developed emotions. They will bellow for days, pace the spot where they gave birth, and stop eating. Then they’ll produce a season’s worth of milk and be led straight back to the rape rack.

The mother’s offspring, depending on sex, will face one of two fates. Male dairy calves become “veal calves.” Some of them are slaughtered while only a few days old, others within a few months–it all depends on the kind of meat desired by the market. Because of this connection, boycotting veal–a boutique expression of consumer awareness–is a pointless gesture if dairy products aren’t boycotted as well. The female dairy calves, for their part, follow in their mothers’ footsteps. They’re fattened and prepared for impregnation at the age of fourteen months.

The normal lifespan of a female cow is around 20 years old. The typical dairy cow, who goes through several rounds of forced impregnations, experiences a drop in milk production after five years. Dairy farmers cannot survive financially unless heifers are producing milk at maximum capacity. As a result, dairy cows not only routinely develop mastitis, but they enter the gates of the abattoir somewhere between the ages of 5-7. The vast majority of the nation’s cheap hamburger meat comes from the bodies of these “spent” dairy cows.

The cycle described here has nothing to do with scale. It happens on family farms and on factory farms. It’s endemic to the project of forcing one species to produce milk for another. It’s a reality that escapes milk carton narratives and Got Milk billboards. It’s as systematically exploitative as anything humans do.

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I will not drink “baby food,” or the milk of any species for these very reasons. I refuse to support a flagging industry that trades in the exploitation of female cows, an industry that rapes them, steals their infants, kills the male calves for “veal” and keeps the female calves for replacement slaves, milks them to death (literally), and slaughters them for cheap hamburger when the animals are “spent,” at a fraction of their natural lifespans. Don’t be manipulated by industry hype that cows’ milk does any body any good! It doesn’t. Don’t be exploited like the cows themselves! Ditch the hormones and residual pharmaceuticals. Ditch the unhealthy fat and “permitted” amounts of white blood cells. For a healthier alternative to the mammary secretions OF ANOTHER SPECIES, drink almond, rice, soy, hemp or any other delicious plant-based milk. For the sake of the animals; humanity; Earth.

I hope as many people as possible who consume dairy products digest this article and act upon it. There are so many alternatives to dairy milk, cheese, yoghurt etc. (and also to all types of meat— inc. fish.)

Terrific, informative article. As long as we classify sentient beings as commodities we pretty much guarantee that their lives will be a living hell. The only way to end the nightmare of their existence is to end our support of animal agriculture by individually dealing with our needless, and harmful, addiction to the consumption of flesh, milk and eggs.

200 million baby chicks ground up alive on their first day of life, just because they are male and considered “waste” by the egg industry. Baby calves killed for gourmet meals so we can drink their mother’s milk—and listen to the dairy industry tell us how wholesome it is. How more grotesque can we become?

The routine practices described in this article are all so cleverly disguised by the wholesome images the dairy industry would have its consumers believe are true. For decades I unknowingly supported these practices. I feel to this day that my money was stolen from me, for had I known the truth 40 years ago, I would have ditched these vile and unnecessary “foods” way back then. The deceit of the dairy industry is unforgivable. Thank you for making the public more aware of the ugly secrets in cow’s milk.

til I saw the receipt for $5588, I didn’t believe that my brother woz trully making money part-time from there labtop.. there moms best frend started doing this for less than thirteen months and a short time ago paid the morgage on there appartment and bought a top of the range Honda. additional hints………. http://x.co/2ey47

If you haven’t watched “Forks Over Knives” or read “The China Study” by T. Colin Campbell, you may not realize that casein, the protein in cows milk, promotes cancer cells in humans. We only need 5-10% protein in our diets which is covered by a healthy plant based diet (vegan). When casein was fed to rats in verified scientific studies, 5% turned cancer OFF while 20% PROMOTED the growth of cancer cells. The studies were dramatic and have since been shown to be valid for humans as well.

This is the most incorrect and pathetic excuse for a factual article that I have ever read. As for the “marketing geniuses in the milk industry,” I would love for McWilliams to expand on exactly what these are. The fact that the dairy industry correctly conveys the numerous health benefits that consuming dairy products has on people? Secondly, I would like to point out McWilliam’s clear lack of knowledge on the subject of the dairy industry clearly evident by his wrong use of terminology. The act of artificially inseminating a cow is done by a straw, not a “massive syringe”. In addition cows are never “strapped to a rape rack”, as I have never heard the term “rape rack” and it is most likely a term made up by uninformed extremists. Thirdly, I would be grateful if McWilliams would expand on a time that he has personally witnessed a mother cow exhibit the behaviors (especially the halted eating) that he claims they do when separated from their calves. Fourthly, female calves are not to be “fattened” after they leave their mothers, as they are fed an extremely balanced ration to ensure that they maintain a healthy weight. In response to McWilliam’s claim that the lifespan of a dairy cow is 20 years, again, I would love for him to expand on where exactly he obtained this very skeptical factual information. Lastly, I would like to address the article as a whole. Dairy farmers go to enormous lengths to ensure the comfort and health of their livestock, as their livelihoods depend on it. It is simply wrong to depend on someone’s information of the dairy industry who clearly has no exposure or knowledge of it.